Chopin invited a party of ladies, George Sand was one of them, and was as quiet as a mouse; moreover, she knew nothing of music.  The favoured pupils from the highest aristocracy appeared with modest demeanour and full of the most profound devotion, they glided silently, like gold-fishes in a vase, one after another into the salon, and sat down as far as possible from the piano, as Chopin liked people to do.  Nobody spoke, Chopin only nodded, and shook hands with one here and there, not with all of them.  The square pianoforte, which stood in his cabinet, he had placed beside the Pleyel concert grand in the salon, not without the most painful embarras to him.  The most insignificant trifle affected him; he was a noli me tangere.  He had said once, or rather had thought aloud:  “If I saw a crack more in the ceiling, I should not be able to bring out a note.”  Chopin poured the whole dreamy, vaporous instrumentation of the work into his incomparable accompaniment.  He played without book.  I have never heard anything that could be compared to the first tutti, which he played alone on the piano.  The little one did wonders.  The whole was an impression for all the rest of one’s life.  After Chopin had briefly dismissed the ladies (he loved praise neither for himself nor for others, and only George Sand was permitted to embrace Filtsch), he said to the latter, his brother, who always accompanied the little one, and me:  “We have yet to take a walk.”  It was a command which we received with the most respectful bow.

The destination of this walk was Schlesinger’s music-shop, where Chopin presented his promising young pupil with the score of Beethoven’s “Fidelio":—­

“I am in your debt, you have given me much pleasure to-day.  I wrote the Concerto in happier days.  Receive, my dear little friend, this great master-work; read therein as long as you live, and remember me also sometimes.”  The little one was as if stunned, and kissed Chopin’s hand.  We were all deeply moved, Chopin himself was so.  He disappeared immediately through the glass door on a level with the Rue Richelieu, into which it leads.

A scene of a very different nature which occurred some years later was described to me by Madame Dubois.  This lady, then still Mdlle.  O’Meara and a pupil of Chopin’s, had in 1847 played, accompanied on a second piano by her master, the latter’s Concerto in E minor at a party of Madame de Courbonne’s.  Madame Girardin, who was among the guests, afterwards wrote most charmingly and eulogistically about the young girl’s beauty and talent in one of her Lettres parisiennes, which appeared in La Presse and were subsequently published in a collected form under the title of “Le Vicomte de Launay.”  Made curious by Madame Girardin’s account, and probably also by remarks of Chopin and others, George Sand wished to see the heroine of that much-talked-of letter.  Thus it came to pass that one day when Miss O’Meara was having her lesson, George Sand